What interests us, however, is the slow-motion mode which allows the phone to shoot a 0.25sec burst of 720p video at 960fps which is slightly above the time recorded by the Galaxy S9 and Sony Xperia XZ series of last year but still below the new Xperia XZ2’s 0.4 seconds at 720p this year. We were not impressed with the quality of either phone when it came to overall resolution and artifacts so we were skeptical about the Huawei P20 Pro since the start.

Impressive specs any way you look at it. There is a P20 non-pro variant that has only 2 cameras, a smaller battery at 3400 mAh, 4GB of RAM instead of 6GB and of course a smaller screen at 5.7″ vs 6.1″ on the Pro. Which means if you want to save some $ the standard P20 still retains the 960fps 720p mode for a lot less. We were told the quality on the high-speed mode is identical on both phone variants as the camera module and processing responsible for that spec is the same. No headphone Jack 3.5mm on any of them which is a disturbing trend for fans of this port.

Huawei P20 Pro Slow Motion Samples:

In the samples below it is clear that the quality of this video mode at 960fps is quite good. Of course, you will get the stair stepping aliasing and moire due to the resolution loss created by the phone’s inability to save every line.

If you look at it side by side with Sony and Samsung’s slow-motion mode we see a lot to like here. Maybe this phone has a better overall resolution advantage in slow motion compared to the others but we will have to test side by side to see if there is a real advantage.

There is no question the color, dynamic range and overall crisp quality of the footage is impressive considering it is a phone. If you inspect the footage closely you do see aliasing but the quality retained is much better than expected here and may make the P20 the best slow motion phone of the year just based on that. We were disappointed by both Samsung’s soft detail and Sony’s excessive jaggies in their recently released handsets.

The Rec Time Problem:

The P2 and P20 pro suffer from the same recording time constraint which is in this case 0.25 seconds or 1/4 of a second which translates to 8 seconds playback time at 30fps from the 960fps input. Still, this is slightly above the 0.2 seconds of the competition which may not sound by much but that means an increase of 1.6 seconds in playback time from the 6.4 seconds on the Sony and Samsung phones.

So Huawei has an edge in resolution at first view and also an edge in recording time which makes it the one to keep in our sights for slow-motion video phone of the year. We hope to have more samples and comparisons soon to be able to rate the phone accordingly.

Most of what you think is interpolation is the youtube compression dealing with the lack of true resolution and line loss in the images. We will have to wait for more samples that exploit the feature with better compression. We have seen this image smearing on even 60p video on youtube when the resolution is low so frame interpolation is not necessarily there. If you find a clear set of examples showing the problem please let us know.

There is no question those clips show interpolation, however other clips we have seen show no such thing even frame by frame. We contacted Huawei on this issue and no response has been received. We will post an update on this issue if it is 480fps or 240fps interpolated to 960fps which will be a big let-down no matter how good their algorithm is.

I have been watching so many 960fps videos over youtube, when compare to S9 and XZ, it looks so fake to me, perhaps only 480fps and double the frame rate with software, look carefully over water splash, not smooth at all https://youtu.be/5ZdAuaBnmKY

Thank you for the samples. We are still waiting for official word from Huawei but nothing yet. It seems they are shooting at 480fps and interpolating to 960fps. It looks better than it should which means they are using very sophisticated interpolation algorithms.

The speed of the 920 FPS recording, according to meta data is 30 FPS (this is backed up by connecting to a computer, going into the phones photo file and right clicking to get the properties) which looks right if you play it frame by frame, the 240 FPS records at around 240 FPS according to meta data

Right now the Galaxy S9 and the OnePlus 6 are the two best slow motion phones. We still have to see what Google and Apple do this year in terms of higher frame rates. The Xperia Sonys are just not that good in terms of resolution and recording time so they are below the Galaxy.